Upcycling municipal solid waste: Scenario-based techno-economic evaluation and life cycle assessment

Min-Ju Park, Sungil Yun, Dae-Woon Jeong and Wangyun Won

Energy, 2025, vol. 329, issue C

Abstract: A comprehensive comparison of energy from waste (EfW) technologies is essential for guiding sustainable development. Our study examined eight EfW scenarios, including five gasification-based, one incineration-based, and two pyrolysis-based configurations, designed to produce syngas, electricity, hydrogen, methanol, and gasoline from municipal solid waste. We performed heat integration to minimize the utility demand for each scenario before conducting a techno-economic analysis (TEA) and life-cycle assessment (LCA). Because of the heat integration, the heating requirements were completely offset in all scenarios, and the cooling requirements significantly dropped. As a result of TEA, the total costs of the gasification-based scenarios ranged between 111.2 and 164.7 MMUSD/year and the pyrolysis-based scenarios exhibited the highest costs with 176.7 and 182.8 MMUSD/year. Conversely, the incineration-based scenario presented the lowest cost at 82.0 MMUSD/year. The minimum selling prices (MSP) of syngas, hydrogen, and methanol produced by gasification were 0.26, 1.68, and 0.35 USD/kg, respectively. The MSPs of electricity from lowest to highest are as follows: incineration (₵7.81/kWh), gasification (₵9.41/kWh), and pyrolysis (₵14.5/kWh). However, the pyrolysis-based scenario had a lower gasoline MSP ($2.70/gal) than the gasification-based scenario ($3.05/gal), demonstrating price competitiveness considering the market range of $2.5–3.1/gal. In addition, in conjunction with LCA, sensitivity analyses were performed to assess the impacts of economic parameters, technical parameters, plant capacity, and subsidies on the economics, offering valuable insights toward sustainability.

Keywords: Energy from waste; Municipal solid waste; Process synthesis; Techno-economic analysis; Life-cycle assessment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544225024284
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:329:y:2025:i:c:s0360544225024284

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2025.136786

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().